Many critics today rightly call for “decolonizing” utopia given its undeniable deployment in imperialist as well as liberatory projects. It is more historically accurate to view Thomas More’s Utopia, however, as a site of struggle, especially given the contradiction of considering a society without any conception of private property to be “colonialist” at all. At the very least, we should acknowledge Utopia’s negative form, and the problems that its so-called colonialism is attempting to address before too hastily denouncing utopia as inherently colonialist. Utopia, I argue, is always a site of struggle, a reminder of the difficulty of imagining liberation in a “wrong” world. Early receptions of Utopia in England reveal that it was not embraced by advocates of colonial and propertarian projects; not only was it viewed as an impediment to the unfolding of such agendas while the primitive accumulation of capital was underway, but, revealingly, the values and lifeways of More’s Utopians were often associated with the very peoples being colonized and enslaved, not their colonizers. Failing to understand utopia dialectically, then, not only gives rise to presentist misunderstandings of the past, but problematically limits how it can best be understood to work today.